Too Many Products Fail Because of a Bad Launch

By David Ronald  

Too many companies invest millions in developing new products only to undermine that investment with an ineffective launch.  

According to McKinsey research, more than 50% of product launches fail to hit their business targets, despite the enormous resources companies put into developing and bringing those products to market. 

There are plenty of reasons why launches fall short, but one is particularly frustrating because it’s entirely within marketing's control: a lack of engagement in a product launch.  

I've worked on more than one marketing team where a product launch became little more than an exercise in going through the motions. 

The product team did the hard work of building something new and potentially valuable, but marketing simply pulled out the familiar launch playbook: write the press release, update the website, create some social posts, send an email, give sales a new presentation and schedule a webinar.  

There was no enthusiasm; no creativity. 

The activities were completed, but no one stepped back and asked questions such as, “What can we do better to make this launch successful?”, and, “What can we do different from our prior product launch?” 

In this blog post I explore what you can do to make sure your next product launch is a huge success.

(You may also be interested in this blog post: Too Many Product Launches Are Unsuccessful.)

A Launch is Not a Checklist

The problem begins when marketing confuses executing launch activities with creating a successful launch.  

The team produces the required deliverables including a press release, blog post, website updates, email campaign, social content, sales materials and perhaps a webinar, but never develops a strategy for turning those activities into meaningful market impact.  

The work gets completed, the launch date arrives and the team moves on, without asking whether any of it actually captured customer attention, created demand or increased the likelihood that the product would succeed.  

None of these activities is inherently wrong, and most will have a legitimate role in a launch. The problem is what happens when completing them becomes the strategy rather than a means to achieving something more important.  

A successful launch isn't one in which every marketing deliverable has been completed on schedule. It is one in which the right customers notice the product, understand why it matters, believe the claims being made and take some form of action.  

That could mean requesting a demonstration, starting a conversation with sales, signing up for a trial, attending an event or simply changing the way they think about a problem.  

Achieving that requires more than execution. It requires marketing to think strategically about how to create attention and demand rather than simply executing a predetermined list of activities.

Don't Confuse Activity with Impact

Marketing teams are often under pressure to demonstrate that they are doing something, particularly when a major product launch is approaching.  

The natural response is to produce things: write the blog, create the graphics, schedule the social posts, build the email campaign and organize the webinar. By launch day, there can be an impressive amount of activity to report, complete with content calendars, campaign metrics and lists of completed deliverables.  

But activity isn't the same as impact, as we all know.  

The real questions are whether the campaign made a prospective customer stop scrolling, gave a salesperson a compelling reason to call a customer, made an existing customer curious enough to request a demonstration or gave an industry analyst something worth discussing.  

If the answer to those questions is no, producing more content isn't necessarily the solution. The problem may be that the team hasn't developed a compelling enough story or found a creative way to make the product relevant to the people it needs to reach.

Make the Market Pay Attention

A product launch should create a meaningful response in the market.  

That doesn't necessarily mean spending enormous amounts of money on an elaborate event, celebrity endorsement or flashy advertising campaign. It means giving customers a reason to pay attention and creating something that feels more significant than another corporate announcement.  

Consider the difference between saying, "We're excited to introduce our latest AI-powered solution," and telling a compelling customer story about a problem that previously seemed extremely difficult to solve, then demonstrating how the new product changes what is possible.  

The first approach announces a product. The second creates a reason for customers to engage with the company.  

Marketing should be looking for that story: What has changed in the market? What customer problem has become more urgent? What assumption is being challenged? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before?

Those questions should shape the launch strategy rather than being treated as afterthoughts.

Start with the Problem, Not the Product

Another symptom of a launch that’s destined to fail is starting with the product itself. 

Launch messaging often begins with phrases such as "Introducing our new AI-powered platform" or "Today we are excited to announce our latest solution," followed by a long list of features and capabilities. 

This may accurately describe the product, but it doesn't necessarily give customers a reason to care. After all, buyers are dealing with business problems that need to be solved now; they're not simply waiting for another product announcement. 

A better launch starts with the customer and the problem. Perhaps a semiconductor company is struggling with increasingly complex failure analysis, an enterprise is drowning in data that its teams can't effectively use or a software development organization is spending enormous amounts of time on a task that should be automated.  

Start there. Explain the problem, its consequences and why existing approaches aren't sufficient, then introduce the product as a solution. 

The technology becomes far more compelling when customers understand the business problem it solves.

Creativity Doesn't Mean Gimmicks

Being creative means finding a more effective way to communicate something important.  

Creativity can mean finding an unexpected way to explain a complicated technology, turning a customer success story into compelling content rather than another case study PDF or creating a demonstration that shows the product solving a real problem in a way that customers can immediately understand.  

Creativity can also mean changing the format of the conversation. 

Instead of hosting another generic product webinar, a company could bring customers and prospects together to discuss an important industry challenge. Instead of giving sales another product brochure, marketing could build a campaign around a provocative question that gives salespeople a genuine reason to contact their accounts. 

The objective isn't to entertain people for its own sake. The objective is to earn attention and create engagement in a market where customers are already overwhelmed with competing messages. 

Launches need a Runway

Another mistake is compressing all of the marketing activity into launch week. If customers hear about the product for the first time on the day it is announced, marketing is asking them to understand the problem, recognize its importance, learn about a new solution, evaluate its benefits and decide whether to take action almost simultaneously.  

That's a lot to ask, particularly for a complex product. 

A better approach is to build anticipation.

Start educating the market about the problem before the product is announced. Publish insights, share customer perspectives, discuss emerging trends and create conversations around the challenge the product will ultimately address.

Then the launch becomes the next chapter in a story that has already begun.  

After launch, keep that story going with demonstrations, customer results, educational content, events and new conversations with prospects. The launch should have a runway before launch day and a sustained program afterward.

Everyone Owns the Outcome.

Ownership of the launch should not be confused with responsibility for making the launch successful. 

Product marketing cannot create market awareness, generate demand and drive adoption on its own. A successful launch requires the active participation of the broader marketing organization, sales and other customer-facing teams. 

Product marketing should establish the strategy and challenge the organization to think beyond the standard launch playbook. If the proposed launch looks almost identical to the company's previous launches, that should be a warning sign.  

Yes, the product marketing team should be asking what can be done differently to capture attention, create demand and materially improve the product's chances of succeeding in the market. But it should not be left to product marketing to craft and execute every element of that strategy. 

Conclusion

The biggest shift marketing teams can make is changing their definition of a product launch.

A launch isn't a set of deliverables, a press release or a date on the calendar. It isn't an exercise in checking boxes simply so the team can report that everything was completed on time.

A launch is an opportunity to turn the company's investment in a product into market awareness, customer interest, sales conversations and ultimately revenue.

That requires marketing teams to do more than execute.

They need to think, challenge assumptions, experiment, find better stories and take calculated risks. They need to look at the standard launch playbook and ask whether following it will actually accomplish what the business needs.

Most importantly, they need to recognize that creativity isn't something added to a launch after the strategy is complete. Enthusiasm and creativity must be part of the strategy.

Thanks for reading.

Are you interested in discussing how to make your next product launch a huge success? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.  

How to Make Your Product Launch a Success

By David Ronald  

Nearly 95% of new products fail to create profitable impact, according to research from Harvard Business School. 

Not surprisingly, the cumulative cost in wasted development budgets, marketing spend, opportunity cost, and brand damage of these failures is enormous.  

What’s more, many of these failures don’t stem from bad ideas or technology, but from overlooking the go‑to‑market and launch disciplines that separate a promising concept from a commercially successful offering.  

In this blog post I provide guidance on how to embed launch rigor, align cross‑functional stakeholders, and transform your next product release into a growth engine instead of a write‑off.  

(You may also be interested in reading this blog post Too Many Product Launches Are Unsuccessful.)

1. Launch Discipline

One of the major reasons why products flop is due to companies becoming “too engrossed in product development” and neglecting market readiness.  

But building a product doesn’t guarantee market traction – what matters is how you bring it into the world, how you communicate value, how you reach the right buyers, and how you support them once they adopt. 

In many ways launching a product is like sending a rocket into space  – building the rocket is essential, but if you don’t coordinate launch timing, trajectory, mission control, communications, and landing procedures, you might build a beautiful spacecraft that never reaches orbit.  

And the very high failure rate of new product launches shows that many organizations miss one or more of those mission‑critical pieces.  

By building discipline into a launch you make visible the hand‑offs, dependencies, timelines and metrics across product, marketing, and sales.

2. Performance Metrics

Tracking a launch shouldn’t be about checking boxes. It needs to be about measuring signals that the product is resonating and scaling. And, in this regard, there are five metric categories that we need to consider: 

2.1 Awareness

How many target prospects know about the offering and have seen targeted messaging?

• Measure – website traffic to launch pages, downloads of pre‑launch assets, invitations accepted, ad click‑throughs, earned media mentions.  

A key question at this stage is this – are we getting sufficient exposure among the right segment of buyers, not just broad traffic?

Ultimately, this stage is about ensuring awareness translates into meaningful engagement with the audiences that matter most.

2.2 Engagement

Are prospects actively interacting with the product narrative and experiencing value?

• Measure – free trial or demo sign‑ups, webinar attendance, product preview invitations, event participation.

The key question to address now is this – is the engagement meaningful (ie, deep enough) to suggest interest, not just curiosity?

The goal here is to confirm that prospects are moving beyond initial interest and beginning to connect with the product’s real value.

2.3 Acquisition

Are we converting engaged prospects into paying customers at an acceptable rate and cost?

• Measure – conversion rate from demo to customer, customer acquisition cost, time‑to‑close. 

The all important question here is this – is our cost to acquire acceptable relative to the expected lifetime value of the customer?

This phase is about validating that our acquisition efforts are both efficient and sustainable in driving profitable growth.

2.4 Retention

Are customers staying, using, deriving value and avoiding churn?

• Measure – monthly/weekly active users, churn rate, usage metrics, customer health scores.

A key question to answer at this stage is this – does the product deliver value such that customers want to stay and expand?

This stage focuses on ensuring customers realize lasting value that deepens their loyalty and drives long-term retention.

2.5 Referrals

Are customers so delighted that they refer others, amplifying growth?

• Measure – net promoter score, referral count, viral coefficient, word‑of‑mouth indicators.

The most valuable question to answer now is this – do customers act as advocates (not just users)?

Additionally, collect qualitative feedback from customers, prospects, sales, marketing, and product teams to surface issues, insights and opportunities for improvement.

3. Cross‑Functional Alignment

One of the major launch risks is functional silos. 

Product builds something, marketing tries to push it, sales tries to sell it, but alignment is weak. It's crucial to build a coordinated launch plan with owners, deadlines, KPIs and an end date.  

But how do you make this work?

• Define a launch command center – designate a launch lead (often from product marketing) who owns end‑to‑end readiness. Bring together stakeholders from product, engineering, marketing, sales, enablement, support, operations, finance, and channel/partners.
• Build your launch plan as a living document – include launch goals, target segments, positioning, key message pillars, pricing/packaging decisions, distribution strategy, marketing campaign timeline, sales enablement materials, support readiness checklist, risk mitigation items, and metrics.
• Set an end date – launch may schedule a date, but the real work lies in the “post‑launch review” phase (such as measuring outcomes, comparing to KPIs, capturing learnings, deciding next steps). Without an end date, the launch drifts into “we shipped, now we move on” mode and you lose evaluation, feedback and refinement.
• Communicate continually – keep internal teams and external stakeholders updated via weekly or bi‑weekly status reviews, dashboards, risk logs, and decision points. Transparency reduces surprises and aligns everyone to the same objectives.

By establishing clear ownership, living plans, defined timelines, and ongoing communication, you turn a potential siloed effort into a coordinated launch that delivers measurable impact. 

4. Pre‑Launch Demand Building

If you think launch day is the moment when demand begins, you’re probably already be behind.  

Effective launches often start weeks or months in advance with demand‑building activities that include thought‑leadership, awareness campaigns, community engagement, pre‑registrations, beta access, influencer outreach, and partner outreach.  

By building a pre‑launch funnel you do three things:

• You warm up the audience so that launch day already has traction.
• You validate messaging and offer (by tracking sign‑ups, engagement, conversion intent) and iterate early.
• You build operational muscle (marketing campaign flow, sales outreach, onboarding processes) before full scale.

This aligns with the concept of a customer journey that begins well before the product is sold.  

As the original article iterates, the buyer journey moves from “Unknown” to “Known” to “Engaged” and, finally, to “Converted”.

Extend that idea to the product launch journey: build awareness and engagement ahead of time, convert early adopters, iterate, then scale.

5. Scaling After Launch

Many product marketing teams celebrate on launch day and assume the job is done.  

But the reality is, the hardest work often begins after launch.  

 So, you should:

• Plan for scale – if the product starts gaining traction, do you have the processes to expand marketing spend effectively, onboard new customers efficiently, support them professionally, and capture referrals? If not, you risk peak and decline.
• Monitor metrics continuously – use the five metric categories (awareness through referrals) to track early indicators of trouble: stagnating conversion, accelerating churn, weak engagement, siloed acquisition. Use dashboards, regular reviews, and trigger thresholds (eg, conversion falls below X% for two weeks → initiate corrective action).
• Iterate and optimize – no product launch is perfect. Use early feedback to refine messaging, pricing, packaging, onboarding flows, and even product features. Treat the launch as a 90‑day sprint, not a one‑and‑done event.
• Leverage success for momentum – when you hit milestones (eg, first 100 customers, first customer success story, first referral loop), use them as marketing assets. Social proof and case studies accelerate adoption and credibility.

Growth is never automatic. Conversion curves, customer onboarding, usage adoption, churn, upsell, channel activation all need nurturing.

6. Leadership Imperatives

Beyond process and metrics, the kind of culture you bring to product launches makes a big difference. Some leadership and cultural behaviors that correlate with successful launches include:

• Customer obsession – building a product you think customers want is not enough — focus on what customers demonstrate they want, will pay for, and will use.
• Cross‑functional collaboration – product development, marketing, sales, support, operations all need to work in tight feedback loops rather than hand‑offs.
• Launch mindset not just “shipping” mindset – many organizations celebrate the development milestone (“It’s out!”) but fail to celebrate the business milestone (“It’s used, valued, scaling!”).
• Fail fast, learn faster – instead of burying failures, investigate them quickly, share learnings, adjust next launches.
• Accountability for outcomes – everyone involved in the launch should own the metrics and be involved in post‑launch reviews.

Cultivating these behaviors creates an environment where launches are not just completed, but truly drive impact, growth, and lasting customer value.

7. Launch Checklist

Here’s a practical checklist you can consider using when planning your next product launch:

• Define the business goals such as target revenue, market share, margin, time‑to‑break‑even.
• Map buyer segments and buyer journey for this product specifically.
• Conduct pre‑launch validation using messaging tests, pre‑registrations, pilot customers, willingness to pay.
• Build a launch plan with owners, milestones, KPIs, risk mitigation, end date and post‑launch review.
• Ensure pricing and packaging are aligned with value and segment.
• Create demand‑gen pipeline ahead of launch (awareness, engagement).
• Coordinate with sales/enablement regarding things such as training, collateral, pricing tools, objection handling.
• Ensure operational readiness across customer success staffing, support workflows, supply/distribution, onboarding flows.
• Establish launch metrics dashboard across awareness, engagement, acquisition, retention, referrals.
• After your launch, review performance, capture learnings, and iterate as needed.

Following this checklist helps ensure your product launch is strategic, coordinated, and positioned for measurable success from day one and beyond. 

Conclusion

It’s simply not enough to build an innovative product.

You must also launch smart.  

A robust launch process, disciplined cross‑functional alignment, validated market readiness, tracked metrics and a culture tuned to outcome, not just output, aren’t optional . They’re the difference between writing off your investment and unlocking growth, momentum and distinction.  

If you commit to linking product launch activities with business outcomes, treat launch as a strategic discipline and embed a learning‑and‑iteration mindset, your next product release is far more likely to be one of the 5 % that succeeds.  

And, what happens when it does?  

The rewards for growth, brand credibility, customer loyalty, and economic return are well worth the investment. 

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.  

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your next product launch? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Metrics for Measuring Launch Success

By David Ronald

One of our clients recently asked for suggestions what metrics they should be using to measure the efficacy of their product launches.

We addressed this question by considering the various stages of their buyer’s journey—the path that a buyer takes, starting from the recognition of a problem or need, followed by the evaluation process, all the way to a purchase and beyond

(See my post on Mapping Content to Your Buyer's Journey for more information about this interesting topics.)

In this blog post I'm going to share the shortlist that we came up with. 

Awareness

• Downloads / Invitation Signups – a lead magnet on your website (such as an eBook) can be used as an early signal of interest in your product. You can also consider using an invitation to preview the upcoming product during the pre-launch phase as early indicator of awareness. 
• Website Traffic – measure traffic to your website throughout the launch timeframe to learn which specific launch activities “move the needle”. 
• Promotional Channel Metrics – look at promotional channels metrics, such as click-through-rate in your advertising, email, and social campaigns, to gain an idea of the effectiveness of your positioning and messaging. 
• News Coverage – news coverage can be an indicator of awareness but be mindful that this is a signal of the effectiveness of your public relations, not necessarily an increase in awareness of your potential buyers.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Top of Funnel

Consideration

• Free Trial Signups – a free trial is a great way to assess interest in your product and provide opportunities for prospects to discover value. It can also be the beginning of a nurture campaign that exposes prospects to more functionality in the product and offer opportunities for in-person engagement.
• Product Demos – a product trial that involves engaging with someone in your sales or sales team is a strong indicator of interest and intent.
• Community Involvement – tracking the participation in your community be prospects can be a good signal, if a strong and active community is a component of your go-to-market motion.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Middle of Funnel

Decision

• Conversion Rate – the ratio of leads that convert to customers is one of the most important metrics to track as it provides insight into the efficacy of the entire product marketing effort.
• Time to Close – the average time that it takes a deal to close can be a valuable metric to track, even if isn’t truly an indicator of the success of a product launch.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – the amount of money that it takes to acquire a typical customer is an important metric and indicates how challenging it is for your business to acquire new customers.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Bottom of Funnel.

It’s crucial, however, to proactively define a timeframe for the launch. Why? Because it’s not a level playing field if, for example, a previous launch ran for 120 days, while your more recent launch only lasted 90 days. 

The buyer's journey doesn't end once a purchase has been made. Once a buyer has converted to a paying customer, the following metrics are relevant:

Retention

• Customer Usage—tracking customer usage over time, such as monthly active users, is a is a good signal of how much customers perceive value in your value. Some companies excel at acquiring new customers but do a less excellent job of keeping them coming back.

Referrals

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)—determining evaluating how many customers are likely to recommend your product to others is a valuable metric for product markets to track. Although it doesn’t measure the efficacy of the launch itself it does signal the effectiveness of your product marketing overall

Last, but not least, another good way to assess the efficacy of your product launch is with qualitative feedback that can be obtained through surveys, one-on-one interviews, and focus groups. 

This should be both internal and external:

• External feedback—collect feedback from customers and prospects to get reactions and constructive notes about the positioning, channels, and other launch elements.
• Internal feedback—collect feedback from internal audiences, including sales reps, marketers, executives, and product managers.

You can use this feedback to identify opportunities for improvement. You could even consider using these as KPIs for our next launch.

Conclusion

Launching a product successfully can be challenging, as the high failure rates described earlier demonstrate.

By setting clear goals around launches, aligning your product, sales and marketing teams around these objectives, and ultimately measuring performance against these metrics will help increase the probability that your next product launch will be your best ever.

Did I leave out something important? If so, please get in touch with me at david@alphabetworks.com and let me know what it is.

Thanks for reading.